Shaping Perceptions: The Influence of Women in Cabinet Positions on Political Engagement and Trust in Central and Eastern Europe

: In the past two decades, there has been a notable increase in the appointment of women to prestigious cabinet positions across the globe. However, we know little about how these appointments affect attitudes about political leadership, levels of political participation, and trust in political institutions among men and women. In this paper I focus on twelve Central and Eastern European countries with varied levels of women’s representation in cabinets to understand whether women visibility in high prestige posts affects political attitudes. I argue that women’s high visibility in executive positions has the potential to affect voters’ perceptions about women in leadership roles. Furthermore, I hypothesize that the presence of women in cabinets will have a positive effect on increasing women’s political participation overall. Historically, women have been excluded from political life and a visible entrance in the executive branch is likely to inspire renewed interest in political activity. Lastly, I expect that both men and women will be more likely to find the government trustworthy when women are represented in cabinets, since inclusivity is seen as a positive indicator of good governance. To test these hypotheses, the paper employs data from the 2017-2020 joint European Values Survey and World Values Survey, supplemented with an original dataset on women's executive appointments. This study contributes to recent literature on understanding women’s empowerment through symbolizing and sheds light on the CEE region where little has been done to understand the effect of gender dynamics of cabinet appointments in post-communist political life.